


as the storm blows on (out of control)

by dridri93



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Character Death, No Sex, Slow Build, Tornadoes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-08
Updated: 2015-09-08
Packaged: 2018-04-19 18:37:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4756814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dridri93/pseuds/dridri93
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a tornado, stirred up by an angry pagan god, takes out John, Dean settles down in the town he brought such trouble.</p><p>Sam gets a phone call a few days later, and he drives out to that small town in Oklahoma. He can't quite believe that his brother had settled. But he can believe even less that Dean, his fearless big brother, still hasn't shaken the trauma of that night when he lost his father. His attempts at brotherly comfort soon spiral into something that neither of them could have predicted, but that was there to stay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, to begin, so many thanks to my lovely [beta](archiveofourown.org/users/iamremy), without whom this story would have made about half as much sense as it does.
> 
> Also, I'd like to shower praise on my wonderful [artist](hushiart.tumblr.com), who made some kickass [ART](http://carryonwaywardhomos.tumblr.com/post/128629821378/my-illustration-for-the-masterful-tale-as-the)!
> 
> Finally, so many thanks to [elenajames](http://elenajames.livejournal.com/) for modding this BB. You did a great job!

The Impala flew down the highway just behind John’s tank of a truck. Dean didn’t know what his dad was looking for; probably some kind of building, some kind of structure for shelter. Rain sheeted down his windshield and snuck under the Impala’s tires, making staying straight on the road a challenge. Lightning flashed every other second, making focusing on the road, which was just a dark stripe in front of him with its lane markings long-obscured, even more difficult.

Dean fucking hated driving in storms, but driving in a storm whipped up by a pissed-off thunder god was even worse than he could have ever imagined.

Finally, rural Oklahoma obliged them, and a motel appeared out of the sheeting rain, lights on in the lobby. Seeing his dad not even bother with parking in a parking spot, Dean did the same: just pulled in, shoved the parking brake into lock, pulled the key from the ignition, and sprinted for the door his dad held open for him, lockpicks already tucked away.

Dean almost stopped in the middle of the room and shook the raindrops out of his hair, but his dad kept shoving him back, back further toward the closet, of all things. Dean froze.

“Dad?” he ventured, “Don’t we need to do the appeasement ritual?”

John turned to him, already casting around for a candle. The stark _terror_ on his face almost had Dean flinching. John nodded firmly, but still continued to push him backwards. “Just get in the closet, Dean,” he ordered, “And keep your head down. No matter what you hear, you don’t come out of that closet until either I give you the OK or everything’s quiet.”

Dean got in the closet and closed the door, cutting himself off from his dad. Sitting in the dark, he added everything up: Oklahoma, springtime, thunderstorm, the closet. He hoped he was wrong. “Dad?” he asked.

“What, Dean?” John said, already sounding distracted.

“Are you worried Raijin whipped up a tornado?”

He heard a groan as John settled himself, probably sitting in the circle he had to draw for the appeasement. “Dean,” John said, “From the way the wind was blowing, and from the color of the sky, and the way the clouds were moving, I know Raijin whipped up a tornado. And I won’t let the bastard kill you. So you sit your ass in the closet and don’t move.”

Dean settled, gripping his legs tight to his chest, already cramped. “Yessir.”

As he sat there, he could hear the wind howling. It sounded like a pack of angry dogs, or vengeful spirits, lashing at the door. Over the white noise of the rain and the rumble of the thunder, the yowl of the wind and his dad’s chanting competed in volume.

Dean could see the ritual playing out in his mind’s eye. He’d gone over it with his dad what seemed like dozens of times. When it came to its apex, almost done, Dean heard the wind pick up, and the near-constant howl deepened in pitch until it sounded like a freight train the size of a mountain range bore down on the little motel. Dean shivered. He suddenly couldn’t breathe. God, no.

The glass outside the closet shattered at once and the wind just got louder.

He heard his dad finish the chant, screaming the last syllable.

Something wooden shattered just outside the closet door. The door buckled inward with a crack.

Dean couldn’t breathe. Oh God.

The tornado – that’s what it had to be – streamrolled by, wind of its passage knocking what felt like chunks of concrete against the drywall-and-plywood of the closet. The walls held. Barely. They buckled, too.

The air was gone. The walls closed in. Dean couldn’t fucking _breathe_.

It sounded like the world was falling apart outside of his little haven. Rain leaked under the doorjamb and wet his jeans’ hem, his hands where they clutched his bootlaces like a lifeline.

The tornado passed. The howling wind kept blowing, though, and soon large chunks of something hit all sides of his little haven. Thunder growled directly overhead, shaking the already-weakened walls of his haven – prison – with enough force that he waited for them to crash in on his head. He was amazed the ceiling had held through the twister. Rain kept falling, wetting his ass and hands and feet and he could breathe again but he couldn’t hear his dad, couldn’t hear the all-clear, so he stayed in the closet that felt like his coffin and waited.

For.

Hours.

The rain petered off. The thunder faded away. The loud thumps on the walls – hail, at least ping-pong size, as he’d later find out – had stopped a while ago. Even the wind had quieted.

He still didn’t hear the all-clear.

Maybe his dad was knocked unconscious.

He was okay, though. He was alive.

He had to be.

What felt like years after the storm, Dean worked up the courage to call, “Dad?”

No reply.

He waited some more, hoping against all the evidence that his dad would pull open the buckled closet door, grunting with the effort, and help him stand.

“Dad?” He repeated himself louder.

Still no reply, except for the rustling of the breeze.

Dean couldn’t wait in the dark and the wet any longer. He forced the door open. It stuck halfway against something, but Dean was too stunned to care. What he saw through the opening was … destruction.

The motel had been torn apart. Plywood and drywall and two-by-fours and mattresses and bathroom fixtures and stupid ornamental décor: all of it, the guts of the motel, was strewn across a hundred-yard-square area. His closet, along with a few others and what appeared to be a bathroom, was the only thing left even slightly upright out of the structure. Everything else was just so many piles of debris or, even worse, just bare concrete foundation.

It looked like a giant toddler had smashed a hand onto the roof and then tossed everything around on a whim.

It looked like he should have died.

“Oh, God,” he gasped, muted, “Dad.”

He shoved his way out of the closet, not even noticing the splinters in his hands or the scrapes along his forearms. He dug frantically into the pile of plywood and lumber and what could have been a bedframe, before the tornado.

“Dad!” he cried, hoping – no, _praying_ – for some response. A groan, a sigh, a cuss – anything. He dug deeper.

His hand brushed cloth and limp, cold skin.

_“Dad!”_


	2. Chapter 1

Sam had been enjoying his post-finals coma until his damn cellphone rang, its shrill tones shattering the quiet of his dorm room. His roommate cussed him out as he rolled out of his bed and grabbed the stupid thing off the windowsill, not bothering to check the caller ID. With his luck, it was important.

He muttered, “Yeah, yeah, shut up, dude,” as he stumbled toward the door, phone still in hand, still _ringing_. God, it made his head want to explode. Why couldn’t he just get fourteen hours of sleep for once?

Finally in the hall, he glanced down at the screen. He froze. _Dean_ , he read off the screen.

“Holy shit.” He stared until the screen went dark, the call going to voicemail.

Thirty seconds later, his phone rang again. The screen read Dean again.

Sam marshalled all the brainpower he had left after his grueling Organic Chem final and opened his phone. He raised it to his ear.

“Hello?”

He heard Dean blow out a breath. His ear buzzed with the burst of static. “Oh, God, Sammy,” he heard, tinny over the phone.

“Dean?” he asked. So sue him; he was still on half-speed at best.

But he wasn’t teased. Dean just said, “Yeah. Yeah, it’s me, Sammy.”

He blinked, staring a brownish stain on the hallway wall a yard away. “Dean? What … what do you need?”

Dean sighed, and the static made his head buzz again. “Sammy,” Dean began, “Um … I gotta … gotta tell you something.”

Sam waited. Silence hung over the phone. “Yeah?” he asked. “Dean, I can’t read your mind. I’m … I just woke up, dude.”

He heard a snort on the other end. “Dude, it’s like four in the afternoon in Oklahoma, so it’s like six where you are. Why the hell were you sleeping?”

“Finals just finished yesterday. Seeing as I’d probably had all of five hours sleep over that week, I was taking a day.”

“Dude, you signed yourself up for that shit? Damn.”

“Whatever, Dean. You had to tell me something? How’s dad, anyway? Still pissed over how I left last year to actually make something of my life?”

He expected a denial, or maybe an argument, or even just a “Sammy”. Instead he got silence. Dead silence.

“Dean? Dad’s … dad’s okay, right? He’s right behind, listening to everything you say. Right?”

More silence.

Finally, Dean sighed. “Sammy,” he said, and his voice caught. Sam bowed his head, staring at his hand, clenching it into a fist. Oh, God. “Sammy, Dad’s … dad’s dead.”

“How? On a hunt?” he choked out through the maelstrom inside: grief at his father’s death, guilt that he hadn’t been there, anger that his dad had the nerve to die and leave them alone.

“No.”

And wasn’t that a kicker? John Winchester, fabled fucking hunter, didn’t even die hunting something.

“Well, not really.”

Sam stopped. “Well, what the fuck does that mean, ‘not really’?”

He could almost hear Dean bristle. “It means not really, Sam. It means we’d just finished one and the backwash got him, okay? Just look on the fucking news, it’s everywhere.”

The phone line went silent again, almost as if Dean was waiting for him to figure it out. So Sam moved down to the common area – there was a TV there. He turned it onto a national news channel and photos of a destroyed building and his dad’s picture, straight off his driver’s license, greeted him. “Holy fuck.”

“Yeah,” Dean said. “Fucking thunder god – Raijin or something, some Japanese god – got pissed we killed off one of his little minions. And, uh, Hammon, Oklahoma got caught up in our shit.”

“Dean, an _EF4 tornado_? And you survived?”

“Dad stuffed me in the motel room closet while he did an appeasement ritual. The EMT said I got lucky the walls didn’t fall onto me. All I got were some splinters and scrapes from digging for – from digging.”

Sam stared at the screen as the newscaster nattered on about abnormal patterns and abnormal strength and weird this and unnatural that. “Dean,” he said. Stopped. (Holy shit, John was dead, his dad was dead, and it wasn’t even a monster that killed him.)

He heard Dean snort. He could almost see his brother’s face: self-deprecation and grief and anger. “Yeah, well, no one else died. Didn’t even touch anything else. Damn reporters are calling it a miracle that the twister only lasted as long as it did.”

“But? You think Raijin caused it?”

“Yeah. Too coincidental, you know. Storm builds backwards, against all the patterns and predictions and shit, then spins off a monster tornado – just one. It happens to level the place we’re hiding but pulls up before it so much as scratches the paint on any of Hammon’s pretty fences. Didn’t even kill anyone but … but dad. Who killed the raijuu, which started all this shit.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh. Listen, I didn’t call to discuss this shit.” Sam listened to Dean draw in a deep breath. His head had cleared sometime between learning his dad was dead and seeing the debris from what killed him. He sure as fuck wasn’t groggy anymore.

As silence continued to hang over the phone, Sam asked, “So? What did you call about, then?”

“Look, Sam, Dad’s dead. And the coroner dug him out, so I couldn’t give him a hunter’s funeral.” Sam listened to Dean breathe – in, out, in, out. “So I’ve got his ashes in a shitty decorative urn sitting next to me. They’re salted, they’re burnt, and … and I was gonna ask you if. If you’d be here when I scatter…”

Dean’s voice faded off, but Sam got the point. “Yeah, Dean,” he said softly. “I’ll be there. You just gotta give me two days, okay? Two days and I’ll be there. You got an address for me?”

“Uh, yeah,” Dean said. He rattled off an address in Hammon, and continued, “Look for the blue walls and grass an inch taller than everyone else’s, because fuck what the neighbors think. Bunch of old harpies.”

Sam decided to ignore that, lest he assume that Dean actually owned a house, had settled down. Because that was stupid. Dean was rooming with someone, maybe a friend of their dad’s or something.

Dean wouldn’t own, or even rent, a house. 

Probably.

He realized Dean was waiting for an answer. “Right. I’ll, um, I’ll be there in about two days. Maybe three. Depends on the drive. So, um.”

Dean snorted. “Yeah, yeah, princess. You take all the time you need. Go get some beauty sleep, bitch. God knows you need it.”

“Yeah, well fuck you too, jerk.” Sam smiled. He’d missed the name-calling, as strange as it sounded.

Silence fell.

Dean muttered, “Yeah, um, g’bye, Sam.”

“Yeah. See you soon, Dean. Don’t do anything idiotic while I’m not there.”

“Oh, screw you.”

He heard Dean start laughing just before the dial tone beeped in his ear. He felt his own lips stretching into a smile. At least Dean was, if not okay, dealing well enough to be himself.

His smile fell. Fuck. John was dead. His dad was dead. How the fuck…it felt like he’d been hit by a djinn, by one of the djinn that fed on anger and grief. It felt like he’d been dumped into a Bizarro world and left to try and find his way out.

He’d always thought he’d be, if not happy, then relieved if John died. He’d feel freed from his expectations and ideas about how Sam should live his life as a hunter, no strings attached and all that shit. Except now that it had actually happened, now that his dad was burnt and stored in a fucking decorative urn (fuck, but Sam almost had to laugh at the face his dad would’ve made to see that), he just felt…empty. Like a rebel without a cause. Except he liked Stanford, hell, he loved the safety his dorm provided, the stability he got from having a mailing address and a place to come back to. So not a rebel without a cause. More like he’d lost something integral to himself, the immovable object to his unstoppable force. Fuck.

He yawned, interrupting his train of thought. If he was getting metaphysical about shit, some more sleep was probably a good idea, especially if he was driving to fucking Oklahoma of all places. He turned off the TV, which had moved on to a commercial for some new medical breakthrough, and trudged back to his dorm room.

His roommate was out cold again, and Sam followed him back into sleep. Packing could wait a few hours.

-*-*-*-*-*-*-

Sam woke up, once again, to the phone ringing. He picked it up and answered it, growling, “Dammit, what now?”

Instead of Dean, like he’d been expecting, Brady’s voice came over the line. “Damn, Sam, what’d I ever do to you?”

Sam flopped back onto his bed. “Brady,” he groaned, “I just finished finals, dammit. Why can’t you just let me sleep?”

Brady huffed into the speaker. “Chill, man. I was just calling on behalf of Jessica. She doesn’t have your number, and I know you hate it when I give it out.”

Sam sat up, eyes wide. Shit, he’d forgotten that he’d promised that. “Right. Jessica.”

“Yeah, man, she wants to know whether you’re still on. I’m telling you, I think you should do it. You two would click, you know?”

Sam sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “Yeah, I heard you the first twenty times, Brady. I hate to say it, though – I can’t make it. Something came up.”

Brady groaned obnoxiously over the phone. “Dude! C’mon! Whatever it is, you can move it. You have to meet Jess.”

Sam clenched his jaw. Sometimes he wanted to punch Brady, to shake him back into the way he used to be. “Brady, I just found out my dad is dead. Okay? His funeral is this week, and I’ve got to drive my ass out to fucking Oklahoma. So something came up.”

It got quiet. “Man, Sam, I’m sorry, okay? Didn’t mean to push. Shit, that sucks. Can I ask what happened?”

Sam debated on how to spin the situation for someone without knowledge of the supernatural. He decided to go with the simplest explanation: the truth. “He got caught by the huge tornado that blew through that little town in Oklahoma and didn’t make it.”

“Shit, man. Okay. You go on, then.” Sam waited. Sure enough, Brady continued doggedly, “Maybe you can reschedule?”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Brady. Enough with the matchmaking. I get it. You think we’d be great together. Just … let me get through this first.”

“Yeah, okay. Call me when you’re headed back, okay? We’ll figure it out.”

“Whatever, dude. Now hang up so I can pack. I overslept.”

“Geez, so pushy,” Brady teased. But he hung up, and that’s all Sam had really wanted. He fell back on the bed, but pushed himself back upright and pulled out his duffel bag; he’d kept it from his days on the road, sort of a sentimental relic of the past. It still smelled like the Impala if he focused hard enough.

He packed all of his clothes; he had a feeling this trip would be more than just a quick there-and-back.

-*-*-*-*-*-*-

After three eight-hour days on the road, Sam was dead tired as he pulled into Hammon, Oklahoma. From what he could see, it looked like a little farming community that sprung up next to a creek bed and did its best not to blow away.

He turned off of the state road that seemed to be its eastern boundary onto Main Street. He drove around, trying to find his way to the address Dean had given him. He was expecting a place just outside of town, maybe abutting the creek bed. Instead he found the address and, while it was closer to the edge than the center of town, it certainly wasn’t anywhere near as isolated as he’d thought. And it didn’t look like anyone but Dean lived there. Only the Impala sat in the drive, oilpan under the front end. Only one chair sat on the porch. He wondered absently what had happened to John’s old truck, then pushed that aside. Fuck, but he didn’t want to think about why he was here, not really.

Sam pulled in, his own Honda making a stark contrast to Dean’s Impala. He pulled his duffel bag out of the back and made his way up the porch stairs to the front door of the house.

He rang the doorbell.

No reply.

He rang it again.

“Hold your horses!” he heard from the depths of the house. He relaxed unconsciously. Dean was here. Dean was okay.

Then the door was pulled open and Dean stood right in front of him.

“Jesus, Sam,” Dean said, looking up. “You fucking grew again, didn’t you?”

Sam rubbed the back of his neck. “Maybe? I mean, can I come in?”

“Sure, right.” Dean stepped out of the way, letting Sam walk through the door and look around.

There wasn’t much in the way of home décor on display. The living room, or what he thought was probably the living room, had a couch and an armchair, more than likely bought secondhand. A TV sat on a cupboard against the opposite wall. The kitchen also coupled as a dining room, with a table pushed against the wall across from a fridge, stove, and countertop. A hallway led to what were presumably the bedrooms. He’d spotted doors to a basement just outside the door, painted perfunctorily, probably just to keep the wood from rotting.

Dean cleared his throat. “Like what you see?” he asked.

Sam turned. “What? Oh, um, yeah. It’s … homey. I guess.”

Dean snorted. “Yeah, sure. I still think those curtains need to go. Old Mrs. Hutch gave them to me and I couldn’t say no.”

“Curtains? You’re worried about … whether your curtains match.” Sam blinked. Maybe Dean had settled down. It was certainly sounding like it.

“What? They’re ugly as sin, Sammy, don’t tell me you don’t see it.” Sam turned to Dean to find him glaring at the offending pieces of cloth.

“Dean,” he began, “They’re curtains. Having ugly curtains is like one of the steps to owning a house.” He couldn’t believe that Dean had settled down, that somehow Dean had managed to overcome their dad’s constant mantra of “don’t settle down, don’t ever stop moving, don’t let anything find you.” He thought it had been drilled into his brother even worse than it ever had for him, that even if John left or died (fuck, John was dead), Dean would keep moving. It looked like he was wrong.

Dean pointed a finger at Sam, still glaring at the curtains. “So you do think they’re ugly. And I don’t own this place; I’m renting it from Roger.”

Sam shook his head. “Does it matter? Look, man, my bag is heavy and I’m really tired from driving for three days to get out here. So if you have a room for me I’d love to drop my stuff. Also, I’m hungry.”

Dean turned back to him. “Well why didn’t you say that! C’mon, let’s get your stuff in the guest room.” Sam followed his brother back into the hallway, passing a bathroom – frog-themed of all things – and another door, closed, before coming to the guest bedroom. “Now,” Dean said, stepping into the room, “I tried to clean it up. Dust bunnies were organizing a revolution in here, dude, it was bad. You’ll be using the bathroom we passed, too. I cleaned it up for you, too, but since it’s like the guest bath, try not to get hair in the drains and clog it up, yeah? Cool.”  
Sam stood in the doorway and stared. The room looked like something out of Martha Stewart. Color-coded bedspreads and curtains – a light green – matched perfectly with the lighter wood that the furniture was all made of. A closet sat in a corner. The floor, like the rest of the house, was laminate wood, and the walls of the room were painted a light blue, with dark green trim. Sam blinked. It didn’t go away. His brother rented a house with matching curtains and bedspreads. And he _cleaned_ it.

It felt like a strange dream.

“Sammy? You okay in there?”

Sam blinked again. He shook his head. “Yeah, Dean. Just trying to absorb the domesticity oozing from this room.”

“Oh, shut up,” Dean huffed. “Roger did the interior decorating, okay? I just moved in and … boughtnewfurniture.”

“What was that, Dean?”

Dean sighed, and Sam almost laughed at the mulish expression on his face. “I bought some new furniture, okay? The mattress in my room sucked, like it was worse than most motel’s mattresses. So I got myself some memory foam, and lemme tell you, Sammy, memory foam is awesome.”

Sam shook his head, trying to hide his grin. “Whatever, man. I still think you’re going domestic on me.”

Dean growled, “Oh, shut up,” as he walked out of the room. “Now get your shit settled and get your ass back in here, or I’m eating your burger, too!”

Sam dropped his duffel and wandered back toward the front of the house, wondering Burger? He couldn’t remember the last time Dean had cooked something. Then again, he also couldn’t remember the last time they’d been living somewhere with a working cooktop and easy access to a grocery store and time to cook. So maybe Dean just took the opportunity?

Whatever caused the uptick in Dean’s domesticity, after eating the burger set before him Sam had to admit that he was impressed by it. Even though it was weird as all hell. “So, uh, what’s new, Dean?” he asked, fumbling for words.

It had been a year since Sam had seen Dean, and it felt like centuries. Dean had … roughened, he supposed, something mores solid shining through where the cockiness of being young had been. Dean looked like someone to count on, someone to trust – old eyes in a young face, he thought.

Then Dean rolled his eyes and the impression of maturity faded like it had never existed. “Still awkward as ever, Sammy,” he joked.

Sam clenched his jaw, willing himself not to rise to the bait. He actually did want to know what Dean had been up to. “No, seriously,” he said, “I’ve never seen you this … settled. Is this, like, a permanent thing? Still scamming credit cards?”

“Nah,” Dean said, eyes sliding down. “It wouldn’t feel right, you know? Bringing a tornado to their town then scamming them. No, Sammy, I am a first-class citizen of Hammon, Oklahoma. Got a job and everything.”

Sam sputtered, “You have a job? Dude, doing what?”

Dean looked proud, eyes bright. “I help out Roger at the shop, fix up old cars to flip for easy cash. Sometimes I help him out with repairs on newer cars, too, but he knows my specialty is good old American steel. He takes a cut from my flips for rent, and I got a house and a job.”

Sam blinked. Dean sounded like he’d settled in, like he was planning to stay. Planning to give up on the hunt. If John had been in a grave, he’d be doing cartwheels. “But … what about the job, Dean? You know, hunting?”

Dean shrugged, trying to appear casual. The stiffness in his shoulders said otherwise. It looked like he was thinking about John’s opinion on his settled lifestyle, too, and it almost made Sam regret bringing it up. “Yeah, the job…” he muttered. “Saving people, hunting things. Man, if I could still hunt I would. But without Dad, without you–” he choked on the words, “–it wasn’t the same. Dad was already pulling away before this mess, and it wasn’t right, hunting some fugly in the woods without backup.

“And now I’ve got these people here, and I owe them, Sammy. I owe them big time. Dad choosing this town robbed them of their motel, and that motel, and the people who stopped there, kept this place going. So I gotta pay it back, I guess. Help them out how I can.”

“Okay,” Sam said, “I can see that. But you being a mechanic? How in hell does that help out the town?”

Dean turned away. Sam could see his brother’s shoulders tightening, and knew that conversation was over. It was confirmed when Dean grunted, “You done with your plate?” and stood, his own plate in hand. Sam couldn’t make eye contact, couldn’t even get Dean to look at him, so he just muttered an affirmative and stood, figuring that Dean would get it. He did, and he took it into the kitchen along with his own, clattering around for a few minutes.

When Dean came back out, Sam opened his mouth to try and continue the conversation, but Dean cut him off, asking, “So when are we … you know, the ashes. When’re we scattering them?”  
Sam blinked. In his befuddlement at Dean’s settling down, he’d almost forgotten why he’d driven for hours on end to get to nowhere, Oklahoma. Fuck. John was dead. How had it not sunk in yet that his dad wouldn’t walk through the door and yell at them to get their asses up and train? It still felt like a fucking dream – nightmare, honestly – three days later. “Right,” he said. “Right.” He swallowed, trying to get some moisture back into his mouth. “Um,” he began, staring at his hands. “Well, it’s a little … a little late here, I guess. Getting dark. Unless you want to do this at night?”

Dean stared at him, considering. Then he snorted, once, bitterly. “It’d almost be poetic,” he scoffed. “’S not like Dad didn’t live in the night more than he did in the day anyway.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, “Yeah, you got a point. Poetic. So, um, you thinking tonight?”

Dean looked to the side. Sam followed his gaze and saw an urn – more like a jug than anything – sitting on the shelf over the fireplace in the living room, and read the name inscribed on its side. (It had fucking flowers on the side and Sam almost laughed but he wasn’t sure if he was going to sob so he stopped himself.) Dean said, “Yeah, tonight. That’d. That’d be good.”

-*-*-*-*-*-*-

After the moon had risen, Dean got up and motioned for Sam to follow him. They’d been sitting in silence for the past hour, pretending to watch the local news, so when Dean waved him outside, Sam was already on the move. As he walked by the mantle, Dean grabbed the urn.

Dean drove them out to somewhere in the rural wilderness of Oklahoma. Farmer’s fields surrounded the road, the moon shining brightly on the fallow land and the nearly grown wheat alike. Trees were the oddity, not the rule, and Sam privately thought that this, here, was about as un-John-Winchester-like as a place could be.

John would be lecturing them about keeping low, keeping out of sight. He wouldn’t have dragged his ass out to a wheat field for a funeral, even one as makeshift as this.

Sam watched quietly as Dean stared down at the urn in his hands. The pop as he pulled off the sealed top seemed to echo around them, filling the empty quiet of the night. He shuffled his feet.

Dean waited for a breeze – something that wasn’t uncommon, with nothing to block the wind’s path – and, as one mussed Sam’s hair and fluttered his collar, Dean dumped the urn.

The ash spread out, borne by the wind, leaving a faint trace on the road. Most of the last remains of John Winchester, however, were carried off to the east, toward the wheat. Sam wasn’t too reverent to think to himself that his dad would be fertilizing someone’s wheat, helping it grow like he never really helped his own sons.

He dropped that train of thought before it popped out of his mouth, though. He knew it wasn’t ever good to badmouth the dead. And he really didn’t want Dean to punch him.

He didn’t cry. The grief was there, but so was the anger at John for leaving Dean, for fucking up their childhoods and teenage years and then having the nerve to die before he could apologize to them. (Honestly, though, he wasn’t mad about John leaving him. John had driven him away two years ago; this was just more final. And fuck, but how screwed up was their family that that was something he could think without boiling over in rage?)

Dean sighed, watching the last dark shadow of ash blow across the pavement of the road. Sam watched him, and caught the moment when he eyed the approaching clouds, dark against the moonlight, with trepidation.

Sam quietly wondered just what was up with that. The clouds just promised a good rain, maybe some lightning. Nothing serious. But Dean eyed them like they were carrying hail and hellfire straight to his doorstep.

When the last remnants of John Winchester had blown away, Dean moved back to the Impala and Sam followed him. His eyes were closing against his will, and the long hours on the road for the past three days were finally hitting him hard.

He fell asleep, leaned against the passenger door, smelling familiar leather and gun oil and listening to the late-night weathermen discussing the front moving in from the west.


	3. Chapter 2

Sam woke up to unfamiliar surroundings. It took him a while to figure out that he was laying on the bed in Dean’s guest bedroom (and wasn’t that a trip, that Dean had a guest bedroom). He lay on the bed for a few more seconds before the aroma of freshly cooked bacon pulled him from the warm cocoon of sheets.

Stumbling out of the guest bedroom, he pulled a few fingers through his hair, trying to get the cowlick that he knew was there to calm down. Unfortunately, Dean caught sight of it before he could tame it, and teased him mercilessly. Sam just ignored him – he had enough practice – and aimed straight for the still-cooling bacon. He reached for a piece.

A spatula whacked the counter right in front of his fingers. Sam jerked backwards, almost taking the chair behind him to the floor. “Wha’?” he mumbled, mind still waking up.

“Dude,” Dean teased, “I thought you were a morning person. Did college kill that part of you?”

Sam blinked. And sniffed. He hadn’t had homemade bacon in years. He really wanted some goddamn bacon. He decided to express that. “Dean,” he growled, “Bacon. Homemade bacon.”

“Uh huh,” Dean said, “And it’s not done, so you sit your ass down at that table or so help me I will break your fingers with my spatula.” He waved said spatula menacingly in Sam’s face. It looked very sturdy, and perfectly capable of breaking bones when weaponized.

Sam sat his ass down.

But he refused to wait silently, because poking Dean to make food faster used to work. “Dean,” he mumbled, “Faster. C’mon, you cook slower than a grandma.”

Dean ignored him. It kind of stung, actually, being ignored by his big brother. Dean always paid attention to him.

“Dean…” he grumbled.

Spinning on his heel, spatula in hand, Dean said, “That’s it. You get your ass in a shower and wake up or you are not getting any bacon or any of the eggs I’ll be making. You’ll get dry damn toast. Go wake up and then you can come back and grovel if you want breakfast.”

“But…” Sam whined. He paused when he realized that he was actually whining. He sounded like a five year old. Okay, maybe he did need to wake up. But he didn’t say that out loud, because that would mean Dean was right. And giving Dean that ammunition wouldn’t end well. “Fine,” he grumbled petulantly as he walked out of the room.

After a shower, Sam stepped out of the bathroom to the smell of heaven. Pure heaven. “Mmmm…” he moaned, already able to taste the bacon and eggs he could smell. He walked back into the kitchen to find Dean eating. And only one piece of bacon, barely any eggs, and two pieces of damn dry toast on a plate in front of an empty chair.

“Dean,” he whined.

Dean shook his head, chewing slowly. He swallowed, humming in satisfaction. Sam only got madder. “Nope, Sammy,” Dean said. “You respect the cook or you get nothing. You better eat up or I’ll eat it all, because lemme tell you, this bacon is awesome.”

Sam glared, but knew Dean wasn’t joking. He sat down, smeared some butter and jelly – that Dean had provided, nice of him – on the toast, and tucked in.

Dean was right. The bacon was awesome. (He wanted more, goddammit.)

The rumble of distant thunder echoed in the background as Sam ate his breakfast. The jam was delicious, some kind of plum, maybe. A noise from Dean had him glancing up to find him already standing and walking toward a laptop in the living room on the coffee table. (Dean had a coffee table for fuck’s sake.)

There was a piece of bacon left on Dean’s plate. “Dude, you didn’t finish your bacon,” Sam said. “What’s up? That stuff is delicious.”

Dean muttered something that sounded like a thank you, eyes locked on the screen. Sam grabbed the lone piece of bacon and his second piece of toast and walked over to Dean’s side. Dean had pulled up a weather site, and was peering closely at the green, yellow, and orange blob marching its way northeast … directly at Hammon. Or where Hammon would be if it was big enough to warrant a dot on the radar map. Sam crunched his way through the bacon obnoxiously, waiting for Dean to notice and complain.

But Dean didn’t do that. He stared even harder at the screen, muttering about severe storm warnings and tornado warnings and hook echoes and needing to see the wind speed maps to be certain.

Sam gave in. This was too weird for him. “Dean,” he said firmly, “What’s up.”

Dean didn’t pay him any mind except to mutter, “I’m looking at the weather, Sam. Turn on the TV, will you? Put it on channel 37.”

Sam hunted for the remote, finally finding it sticking out just barely, stuffed between the two couch cushions. He had to reach past Dean’s thigh to get it, but Dean wasn’t moving an inch. So he stuck his hand down into the crack and Dean jumped a mile high when his hand brushed his ass. But he didn’t say anything. Sam huffed. That distraction didn’t work.

He turned on the TV, and found it already on the weather channel. Dean finally looked up from the laptop, but he had merely shifted his laser focus to the meteorologist instead. The map behind the meteorologist – a rather average-looking man in a suit that could use some tailoring – showed the same thing the radar map on the laptop did, only it had a tornado warning box over the counties west and north of Roger Mills County, where Sam saw Hammon highlighted on the map. The man on the screen started echoing Dean, mentioning hook echoes and then pulling up another radar map, this one in shades of bright green, red, and grey.

Dean walked up to the TV, stared at a spot just southeast of Hammon, right at the leading edge of the storm, and turned to Sam. “Get the flashlight and the handheld radio out of the cabinet under the sink, Sam. We’re getting in the basement.”

Thunder boomed in the background, as if punctuating Dean’s statement. The thunder only seemed to harden Dean’s resolve. Sam stayed put, though. He’d read up on tornadoes as a teenager; he’d been fascinated with their destructive power when the big one hit Moore in ’99 and killed dozens of people. So he knew tornadoes, and that radar signature? Well, if it spun off anything (unlikely; it was too small to be of note), that whatever it was would go north of them. Tornadoes almost never moved south. Definitely not for stretches as far as needed for crossing county lines.

But Dean insisted, demanding with wide eyes, “Sam. Get to the goddamn basement. Now.” When Sam still didn’t move, he watched his brother’s eyes flicker from the big bay window in the living room to the front door. He could see the frantic nerves in his brother’s face, and couldn’t understand why he was so scared. It was only a summer thunderstorm, a weekly thing on the Great Plains. But Dean was acting like the storm heralded another … another supertwister.

Oh.

He was. Sam blinked. It made sense, in a way. Like PTSD, only triggered by storms instead of fireworks or screams. But even living through a tornado wouldn’t incite this reaction in Dean, he didn’t think. Something was still missing.

But for the time being, Sam decided, he’d humor his brother before he was dragged bodily into the basement and sat on. Dean looked like he was almost to that point.

Dean almost relaxed as Sam stood and began to move toward the door, allowing Dean to take the rear. He stood on the porch, waiting for his brother, only to have Dean’s hand planted on his back, shoving him off the porch into the light rain. Lightning crackled occasionally, still miles off, and the rain was sporadic at best.

“Dude!” he exclaimed, “Easy! I’m moving, okay? I’m going.”

Dean didn’t stop shoving him until Sam stood right in front of the folding doors leading to the basement. Dean stepped around Sam and pulled them open, moving down to the basement door proper and unlocking its three deadbolts – one high, almost at Sam’s eye-level, one right below the doorknob, and the last nearer to Sam’s ankles. Sam fidgeted while Dean unlocked each with a different key, rain slowly dripping down the back of his shirt and dampening his hair. The wind had just changed, and now Sam’s hair blew across his face, away from the oncoming storm.  
Finally, Dean had the doors unlocked and he dragged Sam inside. Sam looked around; blank concrete walls surrounded him and a bare lightbulb – LED – hung from the ceiling. A small table in the corner to his right had an AC/DC television, its two antennas positioned just so, and a handheld satellite radio. A deck of cards sat on the twin bed pushed against the back wall that looked barely big enough to hold Dean; bottles of Jim Beam and Johnny Walker sat clustered around a lamp on a table pushed into the other corner.

All told, all the basement needed was shelves full of cans of beans and fruit and Dean would have an honest-to-God survivalist bunker.

When Sam stepped fully inside, Dean immediately turned every deadbolt on the basement door after pulling the big wooden doors shut over their heads. The thunks of the deadbolts made Sam feel like he was in a jail cell, or maybe a bank vault. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling. He didn’t know how Dean did this every time a storm rolled through.

Dean, finished locking them both in, collapsed on the bed, whose mattress creaked ominously, and flicked on the AC/DC television. Some old weatherman came on, and Dean settled back.  
Sam stood kind of awkwardly in the middle of the space. He could sit on the bed with Dean, which would inevitably end up with him pressed shoulder-to-knee against him brother, or he could sit on the floor.

Dean beckoning him over solved that dilemma. He sat on the bed and watched the weatherman point at the radar signatures behind him.

“Hey Dean,” Sam began, breaking the silence. “You do realize that anything severe is going north of us?”

Dean glanced over, shrugging. “Storms are unpredictable, Sam,” he said, as if dismissing the topic.

Sam wasn’t going to let him drop it like that. He sure as hell wasn’t going to hide in the basement for hours on end every time a thunderstorm blew by. “Dude, even the weatherman is saying no one south or east of Putnam has to worry about severe weather beyond some lightning.” he said, trying not to let his irritation show.

From the look Dean gave him, he didn’t quite manage it. Dean fumed, “Storms are unpredictable, Sam. If it builds backwards unexpectedly, I’m not gonna be caught with my thumb up my ass, okay?”

Sam fumed quietly. He sat there for hours as Dean focused on the weatherman with his receding blond hair and his squinty eyes. Finally he grabbed the deck of cards and shuffled them absently, needing something to do besides stare at the forecaster or fume at his brother’s irrationality.

After four hours of waiting, the weatherman finally gave the all-clear for the counties north and east of Hammon (the ones south and west had been in the clear for the last hour), and Dean deigned to accept that the storm was gone. He flicked off the TV, pushed himself upright, and moved to unlock the deadbolts. Sam sprung up to follow him, muttering, “Thank God,” under his breath. Dean shot him a glare but walked back up to the front door and went inside. Sam followed in short order, closing both basement doors behind him.

-*-*-*-*-*-*-

Two days later, Sam woke up with a bad feeling. He’d agreed to stay with Dean over the summer – more because his brother badgered him into it after he’d offhandedly mentioned that getting a summer apartment a week after finals ended would suck. Sam appreciated the gesture, not to mention the free room, but he felt kind of like an ass, a moocher living off of his brother’s job.  
Speaking of. He hadn’t ever seen Dean leave the house except to get food.

Sam levered himself out of his bed, trying to shake off the creeping foreboding feeling, and moved toward the kitchen, where Dean already had breakfast going. Again. “Dean?” he asked, “Don’t you have a job or something?”

Dean looked up from the bacon, obviously having heard Sam stumble in. “Huh? Oh, yeah. Roger gave me a few days off to get you settled. You know. It’s not like flipping cars really involves a nine-to-five thing anyway. And he has Tyler and Josh there to help him out. He didn’t have them when I showed up.” He shrugged, turning back to the sizzling pan. “Sit your ass down. Bacon’s almost done.”

Sam took his portion and ate it, waiting for Dean’s hand to sneak across the table … and … there it was. “Dude, stop trying to steal my food,” he huffed.

“Eat faster, then, bitch,” Dean joked, hand sneaking past Sam’s defense – his fork – and snagging a slice while Sam was glaring. 

Sam watched as his brother bit into his bacon, eyes narrowed. “Fuck you, jerk.” He still couldn’t get over how Dean’s eyes lit up just a little bit every time they traded their insults. To be honest, Sam could feel his smile trying to break through his affected scowl. Damn, he’d missed Dean.

An hour later, Sam found himself getting the ubiquitous tour of Hammon, Oklahoma (what little of it there was) and then accompanying Dean on a grocery run to Elk City, half an hour away. While in Hammon, Dean had pointed out the shop he worked at and Roger’s place, as well as the town’s gas station, which doubled as their grocery store. When Sam asked about actual grocery stores, with fresh produce and pharmacies and something more than snack food, cans of chili, and bottles of beer and soda, Dean rubbed the back of his neck, and off they went to Elk City, half an hour away.

Sam couldn’t believe that he found his brother in a town so small that its grocery store doubled as a gas station. Good God, this place was in the sticks.

They stopped for lunch in Elk City, and finally, five hours later, Dean pulled the Impala in to park in front of his house. (No matter how much he protested that he was only renting, Dean lived there. It was so his house.) Over the drive back to Hammon, Sam watched Dean glance at the horizon, then towards the west.

He saw the moisture rising in a haze himself, saw the clouds puff up into small thunderheads. He knew what Dean was looking at; he just wanted to know why it made Dean look like he was being hunted, small and nervous. But for fear of being kicked out of the Impala and forced to walk back to Hammon, he held back his questions until that wasn’t an option.

Standing just inside the door, now only needing to fear spending the night in the car (because Dean would never throw him out of his life, not after Stanford and not before either, that was all Sam and John), Sam hazarded to ask, “Hey, Dean, why d’you hate thunderstorms so much anyway? I remember when I was a kid you’d tell me stupid stories, try to make it all seem less scary, like how thunder was the clouds farting.” He snorted. “Man, I still can’t believe I bought that.”

Dean huffed a laugh, his suddenly tensed shoulders relaxing a fraction. “Yeah, me neither. And who says I’m scared of a little thunder?”

Sam tilted his head, asking “Really?” in disbelief. “You’re going to pull that when you literally dragged me into your basement just because of a summer thunderstorm?”

Just like that, a switch was flipped. Dean tensed like Sam had pulled a gun and aimed it at his head. “It had the potential to spin off a tornado, Sam,” Dean growled, “And I’m not taking my chances.”

“Dude, have you ever actually looked up the odds of a supertwister – like the one that hit the motel you were in – hitting the same area twice? One in ten million, Dean. You’re more than a hundred times more likely to drown in your damn bathtub.” Dean glared, but Sam glared right back. “And supertwisters definitely are not going to come down from the sky after the storm has been gone for half an hour, Dean. It doesn’t work that way.”

Dean snapped, “Well that’s exactly what happened the last time I lived through a tornado, so excuse me if I don’t trust your damn statistics.” Sam blinked, not expecting Dean to be, well, that vehement. Dean noticed and capitalized on his surprise. “Yeah, that’s right. The damn storm built backwards for fifty miles before dropping a ready-made supertwister or whatever-the-fuck you call the damn thing right on top of me and Dad. And then it pulled its merry ass right back up before it even scratched the paint on the fences of Hammon. Meteorologists everywhere were stumped, Sam. And if they screwed up once, they can do it again.” His voice had risen and his breathing sped up. It wheezed out of his chest. (Sam was worried, honest-to-God scared, that Dean was about to have a panic attack.)

“Dean,” Sam began, trying to get his brother to calm down, to breathe, “Didn’t you say Raijin had influenced the storm? And that Dad finished the ritual before…” He trailed off. He still couldn’t believe that his dad was dead.

Dean shook his head from side to side, saying, “You don’t get it, Sam. So what if it got Dad? So what if Dad completed the ritual? What if it’s still pissed at me, but…but takes you instead? To get to me? I’m not letting that happen. I’m not letting you die because of a hunt me and Dad took, knowing full damn well the shit we’d be stepping in.”

Sam tilted his head. That was new. “So you knew that killing the raijuu would anger Raijin, but you still did it?”

“It was killing kids, Sammy,” Dean said, desperation deep in his voice, “It was ripping their guts out and splattering them all over the walls. Kids. Not even old enough to ride a bike sometimes. And sure, the old Shinto priest Dad knew who consecrated the knife we needed to kill the thing warned us, but. The kids, man. Little kids just dying all over this area, just because some fugly lightning monster wanted a nap on their bellybutton and didn’t wanna be woken up.” And, as if Sam hadn’t heard, or hadn’t understood, Dean’s point, he repeated emphatically, “Kids, Sammy. I couldn’t just…”

Sam held up a hand, letting Dean fall silent. “Yeah, I know, Dean. I know. But…was there any other way?”

Dean shook his head. “We had the appeasement ritual, we should’ve had time to set it up right there by the raijuu’s body, but…Raijin cottoned onto what we’d done a little sooner than me or Dad expected. We ended up driving west for our lives, trying to outrun the storm Raijin was stirring into a frenzy behind us. Instead, well, Raijin just had the thing follow us.” Dean sighed, eyes downcast. “It wasn’t even a big storm to begin with, just some lightning, most of that the raijuu’s fault. But Raijin whipped it into a supercell, and by the time we hit the motel everyone behind us was getting pounded, man. Baseball-sized hail, constant lightning, high straight-line winds, multiple tornadoes…the works.”

“And you two were always on the edge?” Sam asked.

Dean nodded quietly. “Yeah, if we’d kept running we’d probably have stayed ahead until we hit some major city. We were just ahead, getting some rain but none of the nasty stuff behind us until we stopped. Then, well, then Raijin pulled his suckerpunch and dropped the tornado on us.”

Everything was quiet for a few seconds, but Dean took a shuddering breath and continued doggedly, as if talking somehow helped even as it hurt. He’d almost never heard his brother talk this much, or this fast, as if every word was a bullet from a machine gun aimed at something, some enemy. As if Dean was killing what killed John by spitting out every word he could. “I didn’t even think about the possibility until Dad mentioned it, and by then I was in the closet and Dad was setting up the ritual. I had to sit there and listen as the wind picked up and the rain picked up and the hail came. The wind blew loud as a fucking freight train and Dad screamed out the last words of the ritual as the walls gave. It was so loud, Sam, like a train crash only longer because first the windows gave and shit started flying around in the room then the walls cracked and the walls of the closet buckled and I swear to God I thought I was dead but it all held as the rain soaked me and the hail landed around me, and I just sat there because Dad said he’d give the all clear but he never did and I waited until the storm was gone, until the rain was gone, and Dad still hadn’t given the all-clear but maybe he was unconscious, right?”

Sam felt like he was going to be sick. He couldn’t even imagine…fuck, Dean had been right there.

“So I got out of that closet and it looked like someone had slapped the motel with a giant hand and sent it sideways just like that and it was all just broken lumber and insulation and stupid kitschy room décor but I couldn’t see Dad so I started digging and then I felt his hand. And it was so cold, Sammy, so cold, and I’m not letting Raijin take you from me too. He’ll have to take the whole damn state with me to get to you, I swear to every deity that fucking exists.” 

Dean stopped talking, glaring at Sam, through Sam, and Sam wanted to hug him, wanted to tell his brother that he wouldn’t ever leave him, wouldn’t ever do that, but Stanford stood between them, and Flagstaff stood between them, and he’d lost the right to promise that a long time ago. He cast around for some way to fix this, to mend the broken crazed thing in his brother’s eyes. “Dean…” he began, and faded off as Dean laser-focused on him. “I…”

Dean choked off a laugh, something bitter and shattered and angry and wrong, and said, “Yeah, I know you didn’t know, okay? Because I didn’t tell you. But you fucking asked for it, yeah? You asked for my baggage to be shoved off onto you.”

Dean threw himself onto his couch, shoulders tensed and back, the picture of stress and anger and Sam wanted to help him, he was his big brother goddammit.

Finally, he had an idea, some way to maybe get Dean on the path to being, if not alright per se, functional. “Hey, Dean,” he asked, “Do you trust me?”

Dean stared at him like he’d grown a second head and it had started singing opera. “Of course, Sammy,” he spluttered, face really open for the first time since Sam had started the conversation, “It’s Raijin that I don’t, you know that.”

Sam conceded the point, but doggedly continued, “So would you trust me if I give you the all-clear? If I tell you that there’s no way whatever storm system is running up our asses will produce anything bigger than some thunder and lightning? Will you trust me to give you that all-clear, enough to take it to heart?”

Dean blinked. He stared at Sam for a while in silence, as if taking that in, comparing it to everything swirling around his brain, and really considering it. At least he hadn’t rejected it right off the bat. Sam was almost surprised when Dean sighed.

“You know what, Sammy? I guess I can try. For you.”

Silence, as Sam tried not to jump across the space between them and grab his brother in a huge hug and just thank him for trusting him, after everything, after Flagstaff and Stanford.

“Bitch.”

Sam gave in, muttering “Jerk,” into Dean’s shoulder as he wrapped his arms around his brother and held on tight, ignoring the put-upon sputtering and the eventual returning of the hug, just basking in the warmth of partial forgiveness and his big brother.


	4. Chapter 3

The storms the sky predicted rolled in late that evening, right on schedule according to the weatherman on the TV. (His name was Gary England and apparently he was seen as a god in Oklahoma; Sam didn’t really get the near-obsessive fascination Dean had with the man until he realized that Gary – everyone called him Gary – had been a fixture in the Oklahoma meteorology scene since before Doppler radar and he was more like that distant cool uncle who always knows when shit’s really about to go down than a talking head.)

Dean was freezing up in his seat in front of the TV as the thunder rolled closer and closer, following closer on the heels of the lightning flash each time. But he didn’t drag Sam to the basement, because Sam said that no storm that small could spawn a tornado … so that was progress.

Still, the tightness in Dean’s shoulders was making Sam’s neck ache in sympathy, so he had to find some way to get his brother’s mind off of the storm.

That became a little more difficult when the rain started lashing the windows, the wind picking up into a howl around the corners of the house. Dean started and made to stand, eyes wide, but a hand on his forearm calmed him. For a given value of calm. He sat down, but his shoulders only rose more, and his face settled into Dean’s signature “fuck this shit” grimace.

Sam sighed and dragged Dean to his side, curling an arm around his brother. It felt strange; they hadn’t even been this touchy-feely when everything between them was perfect, when Flagstaff and Stanford were far in the future. But, though Dean squawked a token protest, Sam felt him settle into his side.

“Hey, dude,” he said, trying to break the silence, to get Dean to talk, to distract him from the thunder but more importantly the wind. “You never did tell me about your job. How the hell did you make an honest man out of yourself?”

Dean snickered tensely, obviously trying to distract Sam from the tense line of his shoulder that dug into Sam’s ribs. “Trying to chat me up, Sammy?” he teased. “I don’t know, it seems like we’re moving a little fast.” He tilted his up toward Sam, catching the other’s pointed look. “Geez, Samantha, don’t look so bitchy. ‘S just a joke.”

Sam didn’t know why that comment had rubbed him wrong. It’s not like Dean hadn’t inserted innuendo into a million conversations before. He fidgeted, dislodging Dean’s head from where it rested on the crook between his shoulder and his neck. Dean yelped at the loss of support, almost falling forward. “Jesus, Sam! Warn a guy!”

He huffed, “Look, Dean, either answer the question or don’t, but you know I’ll keep asking.”

Dean shrugged against his side, muttering, “I don’t know why you want to know. It was all pretty normal, y’know, not counting the twister I lived through.”

“Dean.” Sam pushed against him. “I want to know because I’m your brother and I feel like a stranger. Okay? So tell me how you ended up finding the American dream in bumfuck-nowhere, Oklahoma.”

“Well,” Dean began reluctantly, “Even though the twister didn’t hit the town – thank God for that, Sammy, because the place wouldn’t have survived – the stuff that came with did. Roger’s shop got hit hard by the hail. His roof was torn all to hell and some of his windows were even smashed when straight-line winds took the stuff into them.

“I volunteered to help him out, because I was already there to hammer out all the dents in Baby. I guess I got lucky that she wasn’t completely ruined by the winds. Who knows how she lasted upright?” Dean paused there, staring off into the distance, listening to the thunder growl and the wind scream around the house. He started when Sam nudged him again. “Yeah, yeah, hold your horses, I’m getting to it. Anyway, I wanted to help Roger out, I was already there fixing Baby – a match made in Heaven. He took me on once the place was fixed up, told me I had a head for cars like he’d never seen.”

Sam didn’t think he was imagining the pride in his brother’s voice. It made something in him glow, that Dean had finally found someone besides their Dad or Bobby whose praise he’d take.

“I guess Roger didn’t realize I was the kid who lost his dad–” Dean’s voice broke, but he soldiered on, “–until he caught me bedding down in Baby a few days later. He gave me this house, as long as I earned a good paycheck at his shop and paid rent out of that. He took the down payment out of the money I got from scrapping Dad’s truck, which did get beat all to hell by the wind and hail and was completely unsalvageable.”

Sam made a noise and Dean looked up and saw the indecision on Sam’s face. “Yeah, I know,” he said, “I didn’t want to sell the truck either. But I emptied the guns out of the bed and took the money, because there was no way I was rebuilding it to half its former glory. It had rolled multiple times, Sam. It looked like a metal pancake.”

Sam grimaced. He didn’t want to think about what phone call he would’ve received if his Dad hadn’t stopped at the Hammon motel.

“Anyway,” Dean said, shaking himself out of the silence he’d drifted into again, “I got the house on rent as long as I work. And Roger noticed that I liked the classics better than any of those imported computer-riddled clunkers, so he put me to flipping cars. And I guess I’m doing okay, because he hasn’t told me to stop yet.” He glanced up with a little smile. Sam had to laugh.  
His laugh was interrupted by a huge, jaw-cracking yawn. Dean glanced up at him, hearing his jaw pop, and chuckled. “Someone’s up past their bedtime,” he joked. Sam rolled his eyes but privately agreed. It was pushing midnight and Sam had definitely gotten used to going to sleep earlier and waking earlier. It’d take him a while to get used to Dean-time again, where 1am might as well have been 8pm.

“Hey, man, I’ve gotta get to sleep,” Sam said, trying to stand. Dean pushed away, and Sam immediately missed the weight against his side. Dean leaned back in slightly, as if echoing that sentiment, but quickly pushed himself upright and shrugged.

“Whatever, dude. I’ll, uh, I’ll find something to do with myself. So … you’re sure …” Dean glanced down, eyes pointedly flickering to the windows.

Sam nodded, trying to keep his face serious even as he held back another yawn. (Damn, he was more tired that he’d thought now that he was upright.) “Yeah, dude, this is the ass end of the storm, and it’s breaking up. Should be, I dunno, an hour before it’s all gone.”

Dean nodded slowly, taking that in. Sam didn’t care whether or not he really believed him, as long as his brother let him sleep. Dear God, he needed to sleep. He stumbled into the bedroom Dean had given him for the summer and flopped onto the bed fully-clothed. He groaned to himself and shoved upright, at least enough to pull of his jeans and shoes. He tugged off his flannel as well, figuring he wouldn’t overheat in his boxers and a t-shirt.

He was about to drift off when he heard Dean tip-toeing down the hall. He appreciated the effort muzzily, but still figured that he’d have woken up if he’d actually been asleep. The house went quiet for a while, and Sam drifted until footsteps – hushed by socks, it sounded like – echoed down the hallway again.

Sam roused himself enough to crack an eyelid at the doorway. He saw a familiar silhouette at the door, framed by the still-on light over the kitchen sink, and relaxed. He almost tensed when he felt Dean slide into the bed beside him and fidget around. But the quiet breaths of his brother lulled him into sleep even faster than the still silence previously.

He slept better than he had in months.

When he woke, he found Dean curled into his side, head pillowed on his chest and one arm thrown over him. Their legs were tangled, with Dean’s wrapped around his.

Dean woke as he tried to disentangle himself and Sam saw the realization of their state come over him. He waited for the freakout, for the denial, but it never came. Dean just relaxed back and threw his pillow over his head, pulling Sam’s pillow to his side as a substitute. His snuffling snores echoed through the room again.

Sam chuffed, too tired to really put effort into snickering. He got up to make breakfast. He wanted to return the favor.

He figured it was a one-time thing, or maybe a stormy-night thing.

-*-*-*-*-*-*-

It wasn’t. The next morning, Sam woke with Dean curled against him, even more hopelessly entangled. He rolled his eyes and got up to make breakfast again.

It became a pattern over the next few weeks. Once Dean’s week-long break ended, and he had to return to the shop, Sam would wake up on weekdays to Dean shoving his legs out of the way. Weekends, on the other hand, he’d wake up to Dean wound inexplicably around his body, arms and legs thrown everywhere, soft snuffles right in his ear. Dean was never there when he fell asleep, but by the time he woke up he’d appeared.

It became impossible to stay asleep without a weight on his side and those little noises – Dean would kill him if he called them “cute” in his hearing – in his ear.

Awkwardness was inevitable. They were both young men in their twenties, Sam reasoned, who, in his case, hadn’t really had the time or the privacy to take care of certain needs in a while. Even so, when he woke up to something poking his hip, he froze and cursed his life and his dad for putting them in this situation, and then figured that cursing his dad was disrespectful so he cursed Raijin instead.

When Dean woke, Sam’s face was a mask of mortification. Dean had, for the past two minutes, been lightly humping his hip. And making some serious happy noises. He really wanted to get free, but he also didn’t want to wake Dean, which was inevitable considering just how their legs were twined.

“Oh God,” Dean breathed as he came to full consciousness, and shoved himself away. He stumbled to his feet and, eyes wide, made his retreat. Sam heard the shower come on in Dean’s room, and he made his own escape. He needed a cold shower.

Unfortunately, that became a pattern, too. The mortification started to wear, though, so they both silently agreed to just not mention it. They woke up with morning wood and they went to take care of it. Sam didn’t ask about the sounds coming from Dean’s shower, and Dean didn’t ask about the lack of them coming from the guest shower. They moved on.

One night, soon after the first morning wood incident, Sam folded and asked Dean as he moved toward his bedroom after watching hours of Simpsons reruns together, “Look, Dean, are you going to keep pretending to sleep in your bed or are you coming with?” Dean sheepishly stood and followed him, breaking off to strip to boxers and a t-shirt in his bedroom.

The night after that, Dean dragged him bodily into his room, complaining loudly about mattress quality and his poor back and how no one should willingly (or unwillingly, he added) subject themselves to shitty mattresses. The morning after, Sam had to agree – memory foam was a gift from the divine. He didn’t fall asleep with a spring poking him in the back, his back didn’t hurt, his neck didn’t have a crick in it for once – it was miracle-working stuff. Dean grinned and loudly proclaimed, “I told you so, Sammy! Memory foam is the best. No argument.” (Sam also liked how he could almost feel the molds that their bodies left the next night – feel how Dean curled into his side, feel how their legs twined. He tried not to think too deeply on why, but he accepted the thought as it was.)

Storms also kept blowing through, leading to Gary England – the great weatherman of Oklahoma – to declare this summer one of the stormiest in recent history. Every time one blew through, Sam did his best to distract Dean. He played Dean’s music on his laptop on top volume, trying to drown out the thunder and wind. He asked Dean about their childhood, and kept him talking, even if he’d heard that specific story a million times. He did stupid shit and made Dean bust a gut laughing at him.

The thing that most distracted his brother was talking about the life he’d made. Sam hadn’t yet seen a lot of it; he preferred being known as the town hermit to being examined as the town outsider. So he let Dean tell his stories.

Apparently his brother mentored a young black kid, Tyler, at the shop. Dean mentioned that Tyler’s mom pushed him toward the shop, just in case he needed to know a trade because he didn’t get into a college. Sam scoffed, thinking that any kid could get into college – look at the requirements for public colleges! – and Dean looked at him, exclaiming, “Exactly!” He went on to regale Sam with stories about the kid, and Sam got a picture of a smart, well-rounded kid who just hated school – someone more like Dean than Dean probably wanted to admit. Dean admitted to helping the kid with his physics project – building a working, rubber-band powered car out of plastic cups, cardboard, printer paper, and pickup sticks – in return for some pointers on how to make himself look and sound more trustworthy to law enforcement – courtesy of a psychology class mixed with personal experience.

Dean laughed when he described the time he pushed back against some assholes from Oklahoma City who needed their distributor cap replaced, and who also demanded that Dean not let the “little street rat” near their classic GTO. “Dude, I went off, man,” Dean reminisced, seemingly ignoring the thunder that boomed behind his words. “I fucking tore every one of them a new one, and then Roger walked in, heard the tail end of my beatdown, and lay into them himself. It was fucking awesome. He told them to either push the damn car all the way north to Moorewood or let Tyler work on the car. They were rich snobby assholes with those fancy asshole moccasin shoe things, so they weren’t going for pushing the car.” Dean snickered. “They sat there and just glared as Tyler fixed the car himself – didn’t even need my help. His first time doing a car solo, too. I was damn proud of the kid.”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “And what did Tyler think about your posturing?”

“Well,” Dean said sheepishly, “He told me to mind my own business next time, that he can handle it. When I told him he shouldn’t have to, he just kinda laughed real bitter and told me something along the lines of ‘So fucking what, I do, and I can handle it.’ So the next time some asshole came into the shop with an inflated sense of his racial superiority, I waved Roger off and let Tyler go to town. And man, lemme tell you, that kid was amazing. Not only did he make him look stupid by knowing exactly what was up with his car without ever popping the hood, but he fixed it in under ten minutes. The dude looked like he’d just been hit in the face by a flying pig.” Dean snickered. “Man, good times, good times.”

Sam laughed with his brother. By the end of the story, the storm had passed, so they went down the hall to Dean’s bedroom. Sam wondered quietly when he’d gotten used to comforting Dean from his fear of storms and sleeping in his bed and waking up with morning wood in his bed with his morning wood poking him in the thigh (or, on one notable morning, at his ass; that had caused some major fumbling when Dean had realized).

He wondered how he knew he’d miss their new closeness if it suddenly disappeared.

-*-*-*-*-*-*-

That same closeness came to a head when a major supercell passed over, its rotational signature big enough to make Sam worried enough to allow Dean to pull them both into the basement thirty minutes before the line blew through.

Dean sat on the bed, hyperventilating. Sam kept trying to distract him, to get him talking, but every time he tried the weatherman’s voice would come in, talking about getting to shelter, about tornados on the ground south and west of them. He was worried, more worried than he thought he’d ever been before. Dean looked a pasty white, his eyes superglued to the TV and his hands gripping his thighs with stark white knuckles.

Sam ran through every distraction he knew. None of them took the terror out of his big brother’s face, where it looked wrong. He was getting desperate.

His desperation led him on a path he wasn’t really sure he should be treading. But physical contact was known to focus the mind on the point of contact, so … Sam leaned in and around.  
Dean saw him coming from a mile away and froze. He was definitely focused on Sam now. Sam waited, face inches away from his brother, arm slung around his shoulders. He waited for some signal – a nod, a frown, something to either give him permission or push him away. (The thought of leaning back made him feel bereft of something. He didn’t inspect that something too closely. He and Dean were still brothers, obviously.) When Dean leaned into his arm around his shoulders, bringing his face closer, zeroing his eyes in on Sam’s lips, Sam took that as an okay.

He closed the gap and pecked Dean on the mouth. He forgot to pull back when his lips touched Dean’s. Dean’s lips were slightly chapped from him licking them from nerves. His eyes had brown flecks near the pupil. Sam had never seen those flecks before. He wonders how many women had – Dean’s eyelashes flicker-fluttered as he blinked, eyes still surprise-wide. Oh. He was still pressing his lips to Dean’s.

He pulled back. He missed the rough lips in his already. He cleared his throat, not letting his eyes stray from Dean’s, seeking out the flecks he’d never known were there. “Better?” he asked, his voice cracking against his will.

Dean blinked again, his tongue flicking out as if to taste Sam (or at least, so Sam’s traitorous brain assumed). He was silent for a long time. Sam started fidgeting with his hands, pulling away from his brother. His brother, oh God, he’d just planted one on his brother. “What … the fuck, Sammy?” Dean rasped, echoing Sam’s thoughts.

“I needed to distract you,” Sam offered weakly, “Nothing else was working. Um. I’m…sorry?”

Dean shook his head without answering. Sam’s heart plummeted even as he reasoned that Dean really had the right reaction. “Whatever,” he muttered. “Just…next time...when you need to distract me…”

Sam waited for Dean to finish the thought. It never happened. They sat in silence as the storm blew over and did nothing more than rattle the outer basement doors.

-*-*-*-*-*-*-

The next week was awkward. The first two days, Dean closed the door to his bedroom in Sam’s face. The first day, he actually shoved Sam out of the room, demanding, “Give me some space, dammit!” By the third day, both of them had dark bags under their eyes. Sam knew that he couldn’t sleep without Dean’s snuffling snores in his ear; he realized that Dean apparently couldn’t sleep without him in the room either.

The third day, Dean let him back into his bedroom, but shoved him onto the floor and gave him a pillow and a blanket. Sam wanted to protest, but knew it wouldn’t do any good. Dean’s breathing didn’t even out into the slow pace of sleep for a long time, and Sam didn’t fall asleep until Dean’s face was illuminated by the setting gibbous moon.

With every day that went by Dean allowed him to get closer and closer. Sam paid attention, and saw that his brother was under a lot of stress from … something. So he asked Dean while they were sitting on the couch, watching some doctor sitcom that Dean was obsessed with.

He got a little more than he’d bargained for.

Dean turned away from the TV to growl, “I’ll tell you what’s eating at me. The goddamn post office broke the fucking camshaft for the Galaxie, that’s what’s stressing me out, Sam! I have a week to get this car on the road, and I don’t have the damn time to worry about the camshaft being shipped while I’m also completely redoing the brakes, the suspension, and the interior! Jesus fuck, those idiots aren’t getting my money ever again. Dropping a fucking camshaft, even Tyler knows not to drop a camshaft. And he doesn’t even know how to reassemble the engine! Because I can’t teach him! Because those damn idiots broke the motherfucking. Camshaft.” Dean fumed, gritting his teeth. Theoretically, Sam knew what he was talking about. But honestly? He didn’t know the camshaft from the carburetor. He admitted it.

“Is there … anything I can do?” he asked hesitantly.

Dean shook his head. “Nah, man, I’m just … God, I want to strangle whatever idiot dropped that camshaft. I’m gonna lose money on this Galaxie. Roger’s gonna be pissed.”

Sam shrugged. “I dunno, Dean, I think he’d forgive you for one screw-up, especially if it wasn’t your fault.”

“No, Sam,” Dean sighed, “This isn’t my money I’m spending. I’m using Roger’s money for this, and if I lose as much time as I think I will, not only will labor costs add up, but the buyer I’ve already got on the hook will back out, leaving me trying to sell this thing on the streets. I’m looking at losing at least five grand because some idiot–”

Sam cut in. “Yes, I know, some dumbass broke the camshaft. Just…don’t let it get to you, okay? I know you can do this. Just shave time in other places to make up for the time they’re wasting for you.” Impulsively, he leaned in for a hug. Their first hug since the kiss.

Dean tensed at first, but soon he relaxed into Sam’s grip. When they pulled apart, he asked, “When did you get so smart, Sammy?”

Sam grinned. “When I went to school.”

“Ha-ha, bitch,” Dean sniped, smile on his face.

“I thought it was hilarious, jerk,” Sam replied.

Silence fell, but it was a comfortable silence. Dean leaned back into Sam, bumping their shoulders. Sam tossed an arm over Dean. It felt normal. As normal as the Winchesters could ever be anyway.

Dean turned more toward him. “Uh, hey, Sammy?” he asked, more hesitant than ever.

“Yeah, Dean?”

“Um, I’ve thought about the, uh…when we were in the basement and…you know. I’ve had some time to think about it and, um…”

Sam blinked and waited. Nothing was forthcoming, so he prodded, “And what?”

He could’ve sworn Dean blushed, except Dean Winchester did not blush. “I just…when you…when…could you…you calm me down when…” Sam waited with bated breath, hoping this was leading where it sounded like it was even as he knew they were headed down a path most would condemn as wrong. (But didn’t they live half their lives in the grey area in the first place?)  
Dean motioned to his lips, and Sam held his breath. “Can you…?” Dean asked, already leaning in slightly.

Sam obliged wordlessly, smiling softly. Their lips brushed just once before Dean leaned in even further, opening his mouth slightly. Sam valiantly ignored the invitation, not wanting to move too far too fast, not wanting to spook his brother again.

Instead he spread butterfly kisses along the freckles on Dean’s cheeks, along the lines on his forehead and the pout of his lips, along the lithe column of his neck. (Sam couldn’t help feeling a little overly romantic, sue him.) Dean kept quiet, hesitant little breaths panting out of his mouth into Sam’s hair. His hands cupped Sam’s head, but didn’t bother trying to guide him.

Sam returned to Dean’s mouth, and immediately felt Dean run his tongue over his lips. He acquiesced to the silent request, allowing his hands to cup Dean’s face as well. They made out for what felt like hours, lips lazily interlocking and separating, breaths shared between their mouths.

When they broke apart, Dean sked breathlessly, “That…wasn’t weird. Should that have been weird?”

Sam laughed, still trying to catch his breath as well, and said, “Dean, our picture is next to ‘weird’ in the dictionary. This? This is honestly nothing compared to our lives in general.”

Dean sat for a time, considering, but conceded the point. He glanced up, already using his lashes to their fullest advantage, the ass. “In that case…again?” Sam agreed through his laughter and leaned back in.

Kissing Dean, as sappy as it sounded, felt almost like coming home.


	5. Epilogue

The summer dragged on, lazy and slow as the heat waves that followed every storm. When August rolled around, Sam realized that he couldn’t stay. He couldn’t stay with Dean and rediscover their relationship like they had been doing, couldn’t stay and live with Dean until forever ended.

When he told Dean that, Dean just shrugged and said, “I’ll come with you.”

Sam blanched and vehemently denied that even as something within him celebrated the fact that he wouldn’t have to ask Dean to follow him if the other offered. He said, “Dean, no. I can’t take you from here. You’ve built a life, man. You’ve got Roger and Tyler and the shop and this house …” He trailed off, seeing Dean shake his head.

“Y’know, Sam?” Dean asked, “I can always call Roger, can email Tyler if he really needs help. I can find a job and an apartment in Palo Alto. But if I stay here, I can’t have you. I see no downside to going, not if it means I can stay with you and keep you safe, help you out.”

Sam blinked. “But…” he said, blindsided. He hadn’t thought that Dean was thinking so…long-term about the whatever-it-was between them. This sounded as close to a confession of commitment as he’d ever heard from Dean.

Dean shrugged. “Say what you want, Sammy, but I’m coming with you whether you like it or not.” He smiled slightly. “I mean, this thing we got going…I don’t want to let it go, y’know?”  
Sam smiled and hugged Dean, trying not to laugh in triumph or cry in happiness. Dean wanted this, this relationship that they’d built out of comfort and security and trust and allowed to expand. He wanted to wake up right by Sam, wanted to share pleasure and sorrow and pain and love (he hesitated to even think the word, but it was true) with him. Sam felt giddy, felt like he’d up and float away without Dean as his anchor.

Who knew that a tornado and their dad’s death could have ever led to this? Who would have guessed?

-*-*-*-*-*-*-

Sam knew that he’d need to get back to Palo Alto as soon as possible if he wanted to score an apartment close to campus, so he and Dean said their goodbyes quickly. Roger eyed them speculatively, knowing that they were brothers, but eventually wished them well and told Dean that he was lucky that he had such a good brother. Tyler tried to act unaffected, but Sam could see the anxiety already springing up from knowing that Dean wouldn’t be around to help him through his senior year; Dean calmed that worry easily by telling Tyler that he could email him anytime. Then the teen glared at Sam like he was taking his big brother away, and Sam understood the sentiment so he didn’t say anything.

Two days later, they were in Palo Alto at Sam’s old dorm, looking to pick up the last of his things that he hadn’t brought to Oklahoma two and a half months ago.

Sam tensed when he saw Brady at his apartment door, obviously waiting. How had he known Sam was back? Sam had intentionally not told him because he really didn’t want to be badgered about Jess again, not now that he had Dean.

But Brady didn’t say anything when he saw Sam. Or rather, when he saw Dean. He eyed Dean oddly, like someone had just pulled the rug out from under his feet. Sam wondered what was up. He never got an answer, though. Brady just walked up and hugged him perfunctorily, almost like he had to do it, and walked away.

Sam shook off the strangeness of the interaction and opened the door, looking around to find his stuff untouched and probably all there. At least his roommate hadn’t screwed with his stuff.

An hour later, after moving the rest of his worldly possessions into the Impala for transport to the apartment he and Dean were renting now, Sam had forgotten the encounter entirely.

-*-*-*-*-*-*-

Dean got a job at the local Autozone right before classes started for Sam, and Sam heaved a quiet sigh of relief – he didn’t want his brother digging out of his savings for rent money and gas money and bills and food. At least now he had an input to maybe balance out the spending a little.

Once classes started, Dean dropped Sam off at campus in the Impala for the day and picked Sam up from a nearby coffee shop. That routine was more because of the fact that said coffee shop had cheap coffee and pie than because Sam couldn’t walk back to the apartment. Sam liked it because it gave him a place to study without Dean constantly over his shoulder wondering what he was studying and asking questions.

One day, a cute blonde walked up to Sam’s two-person booth and stood there while Sam waited. After a few seconds of silence she seemed to realize that he had no idea who she was, and introduced herself: “Um, hi. You’re Sam, right? Sam Winchester? Brady tried to introduce us. I’m Jess.” She stuck out a hand and Sam shook it absently, thinking that he hadn’t had Dean, if Dad had never died, he would’ve probably loved Jess. He could see a spark in her eyes – and she wasn’t hard on the eyes either.

“Oh, um, hi Jess,” Sam answered, trying to find some way to explain that he was taken, that while she seemed nice enough it wasn’t going to work.

That problem was solved by Dean sliding himself in beside Sam, squishing him against the wall, and wrapping an arm around his torso. “Sorry, honey, Sam’s taken,” he said, not sounding very sorry. In fact, Dean sounded jealous and maybe even nervous. Slightly. Sam wondered what was up.

He looked back up to find Jess staring in utter surprise, confusion playing across her face. “Yeah,” Sam said, “I’m sorry, Jess. But me and Dean here met in Oklahoma over the summer and, well,” he turned to look at Dean, “the rest is history.” He wedged his elbow into Dean’s side and he grunted but offered Jess a handshake.

She took it and wished them both the best, still looking a little shell-shocked.

When they got back to the apartment, Sam rounded on Dean, demanding, “What the hell was that?”

“What, Sam?” Dean asked, face trying too hard to cover anxiety with faux innocence.

“You know damn well what,” Sam seethed. “Just because she’s by the table talking to me doesn’t mean you have to fucking…piss in a circle around me to declare your ownership! I wasn’t going to run off into the sunset or whatever with her, Dean!”

Dean mumbled something, face downturned.

“What did you say?” Sam demanded, poking a finger in Dean’s chest. “If you want to tell me something, fucking say it!”

Dean looked up, glare heavy on his features. “I said, Sam, that I wouldn’t fucking blame you! Okay? I wouldn’t blame you for wanting something normal instead of this…incestuous fucking tryst or whatever we have going! I wouldn’t blame you for ditching me and going after Jess and having two and a half bouncing blond kids with a white picket fence and a puppy! Okay? Because what we have is so screwed up, we’d win a fucking award!”

Sam gaped. “Dean,” he began, “You don’t really…” He paused and tried to collect his thoughts. “You don’t want that, right? You…you’re still okay with this? Right?”

“Of fucking course I am, Sam!” Dean shouted. “This is probably the best thing of my life, having you. But you fucking deserve better, okay? You deserve, I dunno, apple pie and suburbia and a wife and all that shit, not some fuckup big-brother-slash-lover who sells car parts for a living. Isn’t normal what you came here looking for anyway?”

Sam deflated. “No, Dean,” he said, “I was looking for safe, not normal. And, honest to God, with Jess I’d probably never have that. There’d have been too many secrets between us – hunting, Dad, you – to make our relationship healthy. I’d have never been able to give her all of me.”

“Damn fucking right,” Dean muttered. He leaned in for a kiss, apparently considering the argument over. Sam rolled his eyes but submitted to the kiss. He figured he could always talk to Dean about his insecurities later. He had time.

And wasn’t that an awesome feeling, having time to live with and love Dean?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I wish I'd been able to polish this a bit more, but I like how it turned out anyway.
> 
> Please, _PLEASE_ leave comments! They are the writer's lifeblood. Seriously.
> 
> Also, go look at the wonderful [ART](http://carryonwaywardhomos.tumblr.com/post/128629821378/my-illustration-for-the-masterful-tale-as-the)! It really sums up the whole story and I love it.


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